Best Outdoors / Best Last Place to Get All Emo Before You Move Away from Hawaii

Tantalus Lookout

You’re someone who’s obsessed with “last”-s. Last time you’ll ever put your chair up in this high school class. Last plate lunch you’ll order on your last lunch break. Last round of drinks where someone tells that inside joke, the one you and your co-workers counted on to keep yourselves sane. Have the last laugh.

The day you move away from Hawaii becomes a series of these “last”-s. Your own quiet challenge to contain an experience. But as the sun sets, feel a new anxiety start to creep in. How do you have a “last” that marks all your “last”-s?!

Tantalus at night is the best last place in Honolulu to capture this impossibility of “summing up” a day, a life, a whatever, because its lambent landscape panorama lets you physically see, and reflect, on this city skyline you spent so much time in. An ideal vantage point for mapping out landmarks and cross-streets, that to you meant something, until you can’t tell apart the sidewalks from the ocean, people from the Pacific, and in this foggy intersection feel yourself already vaguely missing everything.

See the city spill out before you, twinkling with cars and buildings. Follow these headlights and wonder where everyone’s going at this silent hour. Wonder what it matters if on an island we’re just going in circles anyway. Wonder if this is why you’re moving. Park your car and re-read Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” Sit on the hood of your car, the new Frank Ocean humming from the stereo. Text your friends to meet because you want to re-enact that cheesy screaming scene from Garden State. Just make sure someone brings a lighter, so you can do that thing where you burn a candle while listening to Tommy and see your future, or something.

You’re moving away and you have your reasons. However you choose to embrace it, Tantalus doesn’t need an explanation. Doesn’t care. All that matters is it’s here, and always has been, vacant and patient, with a summit view that mirrors the feeling of a blank slate. Because the best “last”-s always feel like a beginning. –